Using the Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a set of books with information on many different topics. Each book in the encyclopedia is called a volume and each volume has a number. Information in the encyclopedia is arranged in alphabetical order. If you do not understand alphabetical order, click here.

Often, the information on topics that begin with a particular letter can be found in one volume but this is not always the case. Look at the set of the World Book Encyclopedia below.

In this World Book Encyclopedia seen above, all the articles that begin with the letter “a” are found in volume 1 while all the articles on topics that start with the letter “b” are found in volume 2. In that case, if I wanted to find information on butterflies, I would take volume 2 and use my knowledge of alphabetical order to find the article on butterflies.

Sometimes there are so many articles which begin with one letter that they are split into two volumes. In the picture above, volume 3 has articles from “c” to “ch” while volume 4 has articles from “ci” to “cz”. An article on chocolate would be found in volume 3. An article on crabs would be found in volume 4.

If you look at volume 21 you will realize that it contains all the articles on topics which start with “w”, “x”, “y” and “z”. This is because there not many articles which begin with these letters so they were all placed in one volume.

Helpful tip: When searching for an article about a person you should search for their last name. For example if I wanted to find an article on Barack Obama, I would take volume 14 and search for Obama, Barack.

Note: Today there are also online versions of encyclopedias that you can use to find information on the internet. To find information in an online encyclopedia, just type the topic you need information on into the search bar. Click here to visit one!

Watch the video below about using the encyclopedia.